In the middle of the night on October 10, 2010, I got a call from my wife. At that hour, I was asleep in a five-star hotel in Medellín, Colombia. I was sharing a double room with my then business partner. We’d gone there to oversee the setting up of an exhibition on Spanish architecture as part of the VII Bienal Ibero-americana. I can’t remember now if I picked up the phone or if my colleague did. I do remember the room, though, presumably because it was the same as all hotel rooms: a brief corridor leading off from a tiny hallway, with the bathroom on the left and a fitted wardrobe on the right, and beyond that an open space filled by two ridiculously large beds, very high and very firm.
I remember leaning back against the fake wooden headboard. I also remember the darkness in the room, the silence, and, at the other end of the phone, my wife’s voice, which sounded very faint, as if she didn’t want to wake me or our daughter, who would probably be sleeping beside her. It must have been six in the morning there in Spain when I received her call. She asked me how I was, and I, being still half-asleep, presumably replied in monosyllables. Then she fell silent for a moment before giving me the news. I don’t think the silence could have lasted more than two or three seconds, but I remember it as being much longer, because there’s only one reason why your wife, who loves you and knows you, would wake you up when you’re thousands of miles away, and that’s because she has bad news.
Over the years, I’ve given enormous weight to those two seconds. I’ve filled them with some of the feelings we humans spend our entire lives avoiding. I’ve elevated those seconds to the category of myth or foundational moment. I’ve thought about them so often that I’ve even adorned them with the crackling sounds that used to accompany telephonic voices, as if her voice were coming to me via thousands of miles of badly insulated copper wire mounted on wooden poles or resting on the bed of an ocean as deep and dark and silent as that two-second pause.
Seven years before, in 2003, the advertising agency I worked for went bankrupt and all the employees were dismissed. It was a small agency in Madrid with just a few very select clients, but it was apparently doing very well. In 2003, the Spanish economy was going great guns and money flowed like water. People were buying big cars, big houses, and flat-screen TVs. Property developers were making money hand over fist, the banks were giving out canteens of silver-plated cutlery, and advertising agencies like ours were earning obscene amounts of money for doing very little. We could earn the equivalent of what my father would have earned in two months as a teacher in a state school, just for coming up with some stupid slogan intended to convince people that our car insurance was the cheapest. My boss spent his earnings on Ferraris, and on taking us out to some of Spain’s fanciest restaurants; he gave us a pay rise without our even asking, believing we were his friends.
When the business finally went under, the head of the accounts department worked out what each of us was owed and, since there wasn’t enough ready cash, he allowed us to take away furniture and equipment as a partial payment. So, one spring afternoon, I arrived at the office with my housemate and his van, and we took away the Zanotta desk at which I’m writing now, the Vitra chair I’m sitting on now, a Tolomeo desk lamp, and a computer that quickly became obsolete. Plus the enormous Swiss-cheese plant that had brought a bit of life to the office meeting room and which was far too big for the small apartment I shared with my friend who owned the van.
A few weeks later, a tribunal decided that we should receive compensation. We had worked there for several years, earning large salaries, and so we each received quite a tidy sum of money. While that money was still warm, a colleague and I rented a minuscule office in the centre of Madrid, filled it with our designer furniture, and set up our own business. The first thing we did was phone the clients we’d been working with at the now-bankrupt agency. After all, just as we’d been left without work, they had been left without a provider, and almost instantly we got ourselves a nice little contract to continue creating and producing exactly the same kind of direct-marketing material as we had at the agency. It was as if we’d stumbled upon a small treasure chest among the flotsam washed up on the beach by a shipwreck. Initially the work was thin on the ground and rather dull, but it was enough for us to be up and running. It would be another five years before Lehman Brothers in New York went bust, and six, or perhaps seven, before the tsunami caused by their collapse wiped out the Spanish economy.
In the first few years, we worked our socks off and, borne up with almost childish glee by the still buoyant economic wave, we soon acquired new clients who we in turn milked for all they were worth. We got used to getting paid simply for smiling, and for the first time in my life I woke every morning feeling relaxed, with a sense that my immediate future was assured. The money slipped easily through my colleague’s fingers, but, coming as I did from a large, conservative, rural family, I stashed mine away in the bank like a wise ant, thus doing honor to my parents and guaranteeing myself a quiet life when everything eventually fell apart—not that I or anyone else could have foreseen the coming disaster. I looked around me and saw only happy people, crowded bars, beach holidays, and other occasional extravagances. It was in that atmosphere of effervescent affluence that I met Ruth on the top of a sand dune, where the sea breeze gilded her firm flesh and the sun glinted on her white teeth when she laughed. I fell instantly in love, like a young adolescent, and a few months later we were living together. Life seemed to unfurl before me like a very soft carpet along which I was walking towards what I felt was guaranteed success.
On some weekends, Ruth and I would visit my parents in their village, about an hour to the south of Madrid. We would arrive on Saturday morning and return to Madrid on Sunday night on the train from Extremadura that passed through the village and was always full of students and workers who, like us, had spent the weekend with their families. I didn’t notice at the time, but it was then that my father first began getting short of breath when going up the stairs. He would reach the landing at the top and be gasping for air, as if he had just scaled a Nepalese mountain. Ruth would mention this on the train back, but I didn’t really take it in. It was Sunday evening, and my mind was already preparing for another intense Monday at work.
We soon managed to gain the loyalty of the few clients we had, and gradually, almost without our noticing, we built up a relationship of trust with them, especially with one particular client. Indeed, we formed such a strong bond with him that we became almost like another department of his company. A couple of times a week we would go to his office in Alcobendas, to the north of Madrid, to pick up new commissions or deliver the work we’d been commissioned to do in previous weeks. We usually arranged to meet before lunch, and when the meeting was over, we would invite our client to join us at one of the local restaurants, which were always packed with office workers, executives, and others who, like us, had gone there to cement deals. Doing business over lunch was what we and the rest of the country did. Not that we ever crossed the line into illegality. We never accepted or paid any kickbacks, but the prawns and the cool transparent white wine lubricated or perhaps muddied everything. Would our company’s profits have been any different without those lunches and all that expensive seafood and bonhomie? I really don’t know. It was in one of those restaurants, a Basque restaurant, that I received a call from my mother. I had to go outside because I couldn’t hear what she was saying above the hubbub of voices and laughter. She told me that, during a routine check-up, the doctors had found something on one of my father’s lungs and that they were currently doing further tests on him at the hospital in Toledo.
One day our main client summoned us to a meeting. In the same office where we had so often given our presentations, he told us that, due to internal restructuring, they were going to have to make a substantial reduction in the number of commissions they gave us. We didn’t have the manpower to take on the amount of work to be generated by the department that would emerge from that restructuring. Or so at least he told us, but Madrid is a small place, and we soon found out that a much bigger advertising agency had offered to take on all the work currently shared out among smaller companies like ours. We could only assume that at the lunches organized by that larger agency, they had plied him with even more expensive wine, which had clearly lubricated parts we couldn’t reach. It served us right, really. We too had made money hand over fist, but this was an end of the era of fat invoices and slapped-on percentages. And so we were reduced to dusting off our address books and calling old colleagues, clients of other clients, acquaintances, and even companies we found in Yellow Pages.
It was then that my daughter was born. We called her Andrea.
The doctors said, straight out, that it was a tumor. The talk was no longer about illness or disease. The word tumor doesn’t aim to please or allow for misinterpretations. And what does it mean in medical terms? Perhaps, seen from a cellular level, tumor tissue is no different from healthy tissue. Maybe both are pink and shiny, although in the layman’s imagination a tumor is always a black mass. It might be even denser than the organ that surrounds and nourishes it. The word tumor conjures up foul odors, as if something like a dead rodent were trapped inside the organism, marinating in the body’s juices, rotting away in that inner darkness and infecting all the other tissues with its malignity. A tumor is, then, something that grows from the inside out. A dark implosion which, if not removed promptly, will end up contaminating the whole body. No organism can withstand that searing heat. Sooner or later, the black wave will reach one of the many vital centers, which is why the body must be cut open with a sterilized implement. The surgeon’s hands use the delicate steel blade to part the flesh, like Moses parting the Red Sea so that the people of Israel could escape the tyranny of the Pharaohs. However, it wasn’t time for that yet. There were various other stages to go through first, stages intended as much to curtail the illness as to set our minds on a different path. The doctors must stay true to their Hippocratic Oath and family members and friends must gradually “get used to the idea.” Both these things take time. Before accepting that death is a possibility, we have to let go of the various concentric rings protecting us from the horror that the idea of death evokes.
Fortunately, the first stage required no profanation of the flesh. My father merely had to undergo sessions of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Nothing invasive—at least not visibly so. These initial stages proved bearable for everyone, even for the patient, who was left all alone to throw up in the bathroom of his hospital room in Madrid, where he stayed for a couple of weeks. I went to visit him almost every day. I would meet up there with my mother, have lunch with her in the cafeteria, and talk about the village, about my siblings, about my work, about what the doctor had said on his last visit. She would tell me whether my father had had a good or bad night, how the nurses treated him, the changes that would have to be made to the house to accommodate a chronically ill patient. We skirted around the subject as if we were poets, never actually mentioning what lay at the heart of the matter.
The lack of clients was killing our business, and so we considered either moving to an office away from the center or selling our designer furniture and buying something less expensive. We’d have to sell the furniture off cheap, of course, because any potential buyers of used furniture, however luxurious, would be having as hard a time as we were and might not be in the mood to appreciate the high quality of the materials. My desk, for example, is made up of a heavy six-by-three slab of toughened glass supported on a beechwood frame assembled with such skill and delicacy that you can’t even feel the joins when you run your hand over them. Beechwood had always been my father’s favorite. He kept a store of different types of wood in his workshop, where he would busy himself doing all kinds of things, from producing full-size copies of Velázquez’s major paintings to helping my brother in his work as a maker of plaster moldings. He would find pieces of wood at the local dump or perhaps abandoned on one of the many buildings sites in the village. He used the pine wood from pallets for cruder work: a stool to stand on to reach the top shelves of cupboards, a mount so that the drill could be attached to the work bench and used as a lathe, a coat rack with four nails in it where they could hang their work coats. There was walnut wood from a bookshelf someone had given him, as well as ash, Mediterranean pine, olive, and sapele mahogany left over from when he had made the internal doors for the house. Some types of wood were better than others, but my father’s particular favorite was always beechwood. The beech is a relatively scarce tree and grows very slowly; its wood is dense and smooth and pale. While it has barely any knots, it’s full of very fine lines, rather like the lines a child would draw on paper to represent rain. My father would create his finest pieces from that wood—a spindle so that my younger sister could spin wool or silk, a small sculpture of a mother and child, a photo frame inlaid with ebony, kitchen utensils. My father had never visited my office in Madrid, and so had never seen the beechwood frame of my Zanotta desk. If he had, one of two things could have happened: he would either have been amazed at the impeccable way the frame had been made, or he would have wanted to add it to the other pieces of wood waiting to be dismantled and transformed into tumblers, plates, chess pieces, or parts for a spinning wheel.
My partner and I had, in extremis, finally abandoned the idea of selling our expensive desks, when a visionary young architect came to our rescue. He had been commissioned to design the exhibition for the Bienal Española de Arquitectura. He wanted us to find and manage teams of carpenters and fitters, and put flesh on the bones of his vision of how best to present to the public the finest examples of Spanish architecture from the last two years. This took months of preparation. We contacted companies who specialized in putting on exhibitions and creating ephemeral architecture; we hired workers, drew up budgets, placed orders, and put all the machinery in place so that, when the exhibition space opened its doors to us, we could set the whole thing up in five days.
I hardly saw Ruth during that time. On the few days when I left work early, we would have supper together at home. She would update me on life in the outside world, tell me that she’d spoken to my mother, and, quite rightly, tell me off because she spoke to her more often than I did. She would talk, too, about what she sensed was happening to my father. She had experienced the long-drawn-out death of her own father, during which she had almost lived at the hospital where he spent his last months. It got to the point, she said, where her mother would arrive to visit her husband and immediately put on a white coat and walk the corridors as if she were a nurse or an experienced doctor. She would visit the other patients in the neighboring rooms, take them magazines and food, console them and keep them company when they were alone. They would even ask her “medical advice,” and since, after all those months of visiting the hospital, her white coat had become almost like a second skin, she would offer her opinion on a facetectomy, would examine an x-ray by holding it up to the light, or would recommend that they try taking clavulanic acid alongside amoxicillin. When Ruth told me this, we laughed, but it was rather hollow laughter, more weary than joyful. A laughter in which fear was already crouching.
The Bienal Española de Arquitectura was a relative success. We had put our very best efforts into it, but the public was so specialized and few in number that we wondered if all our hard work had really been worth it. This was in the days just after my father’s first operation. Neither the chemotherapy nor the radiotherapy had succeeded in shrinking the tumor, and it now occupied a large part of his right lung. Even so, the doctors seemed pleased and spoke of having done “a good job,” of having left it all “nice and clean,” referring to the hole they had made in him. They explained that at this stage of the illness the important thing was to stop the tumor growing, which is why they needed to eliminate any trace of tumor tissue. The tiniest fragment of that black stinking mass was like a single spark in a parched pine forest, a spark that might of course be too tiny to be detected by even the most advanced diagnostic tools. All that remained was the surgeon’s skill and his instinct for where that spark might be hiding.
The operation sounded to me like pure butchery, with the surgeon going in with a knife to remove the malignant tissue and, just in case, going in a little deeper, so that nothing would be left behind. Perhaps surgeons take a certain pleasure in those precise movements, cutting into the flesh, separating it from the bones—the kind of pleasure a sushi chef might feel when slicing fish. I really didn’t care what motivated the surgeon who opened up my father and penetrated the most hidden corners of his being. Regardless of whether it was professional zeal or a taste for cutting into flesh, what mattered was that he went in as deeply as he could in order to drive out the devil. It had to be that way, because once a body has been sewn up, the surgeons really don’t want to open it up again. Bacteria can slip in through the same door as the sterilized steel scalpel. The surgeon who explained what he would be doing certainly didn’t stint on the technical terminology, even though he could see from our faces that we didn’t understand. He was doubtless seeking refuge behind all that inflated jargon. Saying “subclavian artery” and “mesothelioma” was his way of defending himself against being sucked into our grief and fear. I wondered how many other families he had baffled with his verbiage that same day. But what else could he do? Sit down with us, place a comforting hand on my mother’s shoulder, recall his own father, allow his eyes to fill up with tears, join us on our journey? No, thank you. He could keep his tears. I didn’t want them dripping into my father’s body when he cut it open.
That “successful” operation left my father prostrate in bed for ten days. My mother was visibly wasting away. Too long spent breathing hospital air drains the color from the skin. Meanwhile, my siblings and I got on with our lives. We came and went, we visited our father, then went back to our work, to our thriving children who were waiting for us at home like nestlings with their beaks wide open, more beak than face. What saved me were Ruth, Andrea, and my work. When you’re at the office or in your workshop, you can become as passionately absorbed in what you’re doing as children can in the games they play. Or perhaps it isn’t passion, just a need to be with someone else, perhaps the colleague with whom you can tell cruel jokes without being judged, whom you trust absolutely, who is loyalty incarnate. Being with him is like being with the brother you yourself have chosen. Essence of brother. Our paths had crossed at just the right moment. We were both bringing up our families and having great fun. We hadn’t even had to sell our expensive furniture. What more could we ask?
After the Bienal de Arquitectura, we collaborated on other projects with that same architect. One, for example, was a bridal shower for the daughter of one of Spain’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. Our architect was going to transform an old palace just outside Madrid into a kind of dream landscape for her and her distinguished guests. With the money that would be spent that night on subtle lighting and piles of coral sand, you could have bought thousands and thousands of scalpels with which to slice open diseased bodies. We could have decorated a room in that palace with those bloodied scraps of flesh, but we didn’t. On the contrary, we spent the family fortune on laying down real turf in all the rooms, on commissioning a twenty-five-foot ice sculpture that would last as long as the party lasted, on suspending a real tree upside down from the ceiling. We decorated the garden walls with neon verses that I myself had written and installed fountains, chocolate cascades, strings of fairy lights. Food was served in every room, and in every corner there were bottles of Veuve Clicquot chilled to a perfect forty-two degrees Fahrenheit. We worked like galley slaves for a whole month just to create that one day. That was what fueled our relationship: a camaraderie forged in the stinking bilge-water of a galley. And while I was busy stoking the fire of that friendship, my father was back in his village rotting away, taking ever stronger sedatives, silently crying out, burning up inside.
Lehman Brothers collapsed.
The days of exciting projects came to an end, and we were again reduced to producing hastily designed posters and pamphlets to be stuck on car windscreens. We worked longer and longer hours in order to earn the same or less, and one day, in a bar downtown, eating potato croquettes and drinking beer, we reminisced about our boom years. My colleague reminded me of the weekend when we decided to hold an annual general meeting. We rented a luxurious house outside Madrid and spent the whole weekend discussing the future of the company and eating in the best local restaurants. It was just him and me, the agency’s only partners, celebrating a congress in the mountains, our own miniature Davos. It seemed an age since that had happened, and sitting there with our croquettes, it didn’t seem that funny any more, and so we finished our beers and went home.
It was time once again to dust off our address books. We phoned everyone and anyone who might have some work for us. We weren’t the only ones left idle. The country was in dire straits. Young people were beginning to pack their bags to try their luck abroad. Every day there were articles in the newspapers about people being evicted from their homes because they couldn’t pay the mortgage. Children began living off their parents’ pensions. They moved in with them, grandchildren and all. Multiple scandals about corruption and speculation—always rife in Spain—began bubbling to the surface. The people pointed the finger at the government. It was easy to think they were the ones who had made off with what we no longer had. The people roared and seethed.
Every day, my father had to take a bewildering cocktail of medicines, pills of every color kept in a little box that he, of course, had made out of bits of beechwood. To keep tabs on what he was taking, he amused himself by filling little calendars with his small, neat, schoolmasterly writing. So numerous were the pills and so varied the doses that his whole day was taken up with swallowing those various medicines, all washed down with a glass of water. He had also been prescribed fentanyl patches for when the pain became too acute. Usually my sister or my mother applied the patches, but during one of my visits that job fell to me. The patch had to be applied near the shoulder blade. He lifted his shirt to reveal his bony back, and his skin resembled the patch itself, a delicate film of elastic, semi-transparent plastic. The people who had designed the patch, in Germany, France, or the United States, had presumably intended it to match human skin so that the dressing would blend in with the body, becoming part of it. That plastic, which I found hard to stick to his skin without its wrinkling, released analgesic substances that made his life more bearable. He began with just twelve micrograms, the lowest dosage. The patches gave my father a deceptive appearance of normality. He would get out of bed on his own and move around the house fairly easily. He would go over to a shelf to fetch a book or put his favorite video about lions in the video player. What that patch did, though, was disguise reality. If it didn’t hurt, then it was as if the pain didn’t exist. And I began to consider pharmacology a truly miraculous discipline.
At work we were getting so few commissions that we ended up closing the office and taking our respective items of furniture home. My spendthrift partner soon had to sell his. I got by on my savings. He and my other compatriots were sliding towards poverty, but as yet I was unaware that the same thing was happening to me. My savings were my fentanyl patch. The months passed and things became still worse. The government made what cuts it could and made those cuts with a savagery worthy of the most sadistic surgeon. And the bureaucrats did sterling work telling the politicians where they needed to put the knife in. They told us: We’re removing tumors, eliminating unproductive tissue. It hurts, but it’s for your own good. Once we’ve finished, things will be better.
Just when everything was falling apart, that same talented young architect got in touch with us again. For some reason even he didn’t understand, the same exhibition we had put on earlier had been selected by the school of architecture to be taken to Colombia. We climbed back into the saddle. Since we no longer had an office, we met in bars, in the offices of friends, or at home. Wherever we were, we would take out our laptops and set to work. Every now and then my partner would dig me in the ribs and say: Hey, we’re off to Colombia, just like a couple of jet-setting executives. Spain might well be in a dreadful state, but we were being paid to spend ten days on the other side of the Atlantic, where we would be staying in a five-star hotel. After weeks of barely bothering to change out of our pajamas, we would once again be managing teams of workers, ordering materials, and being part of Medellín’s booming cultural scene. For a few days I forgot about my father. At one point my sister mentioned that the doctors had increased the dose of the fentanyl patches to twenty-five micrograms, but this news barely registered with me; it ran through my fingers like fine sand, because, while I was talking to her on the phone, my partner was on the other side of the desk showing me a color card with a sample we’d been discussing for the best part of a week. With my mobile phone pressed to my ear, responding in monosyllables to what my sister was saying, I pointed to a particular dark gray and wagged my finger to indicate my disapproval. My partner returned to his work and I ended the call, determined to put the case for a gray that tended more to smoke-gray than to graphite.
Two days before flying to Colombia, I went with my mother to the hospital where my father had had his operation. Two weeks earlier, the hospital had carried out some follow-up tests, and they were going to give us the results. It was no longer an illness, a disease, a tumor, or even cancer. Now it was metastasis. Exactly as we feared. Someone had left a live spark inside my father’s body. Now his ribs were on fire, and the black fluid was finding concealed doorways into the very center of the living matter, into a place so hidden that it was now impossible to dig it out. The doctor told us this, pointing at an x-ray plate showing part of a bone, a solid white shell with, at its center, a network of fine calcareous threads. Trabeculae, he called them.
I traveled back to the village with my mother. We stared out of the train window at the barley fields, which seemed drier than usual. When we arrived, my sister was there to welcome us. I summarized what the doctor had told us. She sat down next to my mother and put her arms around her. I went to the bedroom where my father was resting. The blind was down. The air smelled of pajamas. I sat him up so as to change his patch, and while I was doing this, I told him we’d just come back from Madrid and now had the results of the tests. He moaned as he expelled air from his one remaining lung. It wasn’t so much a moan as a whistle emerging from his weary airways. When I’d finished, and before he lay down again, I asked if he wanted to know what was in the oncologist’s report. He said nothing. His short breaths were almost as fast as the beats of my heart. The dark room, his presence there, his interminable silence. No, he said at last, and lay back down. I stood up to leave the room, but first I paused in the half-darkness. Papa, I said, I’ve got to go away for a few days, but we can talk about it all when I return. For a moment, I listened to his breathing, then I opened the door and left.
(Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa)
Jésus Carrasco received the European Prize for Literature in 2016; his debut novel, Out in the Open, has been translated into twenty-five languages. Margaret Jull Costa, his translator, has a forthcoming translation of Ana Luisa’s poetry collection What’s in a Name due out soon from New Directions.
